Maya
Eight legs. Flat against my ceiling, right over my bed.
And then — it opened its eyes.
It knows I’m here.
Maya
Hi. It’s Maya. Welcome to Maya and the Fog.
Leo
And Leo.
Maya
And Leo. Who doesn’t believe any of this.
Leo
Because none of it happened.
Maya
Before we start, I have to tell you something. This one is scary. Not pretend-scary.
Actually… scary.
There’s a part in the middle where I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t see, and I couldn’t even yell for my mom.
So if you need to hold somebody’s hand — now would be a good time to go find one.
Leo
She’s being dramatic.
Maya
Leo was asleep. For all of it. Leo also says he’s too old for rules, and that dogs can’t tell when something’s wrong, and that spiders are only ever the size of a raisin.
So… you decide.
This one’s about the night the spider came. It happened on a Tuesday. It happened in our room. And it happened because of candy.
Leo
Allegedly.
Maya
Okay. Here we go.
Bedtime
Maya
So. It was a Tuesday night, and the fog came in. You know how the fog comes in at our house? It comes in off the ocean so thick you can’t see the streetlight, or the palm tree, or the neighbor’s cat. You can’t see anything. Just your own window. And whatever’s on the other side of it.
Mom came in to say goodnight.
Mom
Lights out, you two. Teeth brushed? Leo. Nothing in that bed but you and a pillow. Right?
Leo
Right.
Maya
He was lying. He had a whole bag of gummies under his blanket. Strawberry ones. I could hear them.
Mom
Mm-hm. Love you. Door open or closed?
Maya
Open.
Mom
Open it is. Night, kids.
Maya
He waited until Mom’s footsteps got all the way to the bottom of the stairs. And then —
Leo
Psst. Maya. You want one?
Maya
Leo! No snacks in the bedroom. That’s the rule.
Leo
That’s Mom’s rule. I’m eight. I have my own rules.
Maya
What are your rules?
Leo
Rule one: gummies are delicious. Rule two: see rule one.
Okay, that part’s true.
Maya
Moose was watching him the whole time. That’s our dog. He’s big and yellow, and he watches anything that might turn into food later. He was out of luck. Leo ate the whole bag. Every single one. And when he was done, he didn’t get up and throw the wrappers away — because that would mean getting up.
So he reached down in the dark —
— and he pushed the whole crinkly mess under my bed.
Leo. That’s my bed.
Leo
Then it’s your problem. G’night.
Maya
And here’s the thing nobody told Leo. There’s a rule at our house that’s older than Mom’s rules. Nobody wrote it down. But Moose knows it. Every dog knows it.
Snacks bring guests.
Leo
That’s not a rule. You made that up.
Maya
Then how do you explain what happened next?
Leo
…Physics.
Maya
So it’s dark now. Really dark. Leo’s snoring.
Baby Lily’s down the hall making her little sleepy noises.
Moose is on the floor between our beds, like always.
Everything’s normal. For about eleven minutes.
Under the bed
Maya
And then the house goes quiet. Not regular quiet — all-the-way quiet. The fridge stops humming. The fog is pressing on the window like it wants in. And from right underneath me — right under my bed — I hear it.
Crinkle. Scrape. Crinkle.
Something is moving one of Leo’s wrappers. Slow. Careful. Like it doesn’t want to get caught.
Leo. Leo, wake up. There’s something under my bed.
Leo
There’s nothing under your bed.
Maya
There’s a sound under my bed.
Leo
It’s the house. Houses make sounds. It’s called physics.
Maya
Houses don’t crinkle.
Leo
Old houses crinkle. Go to sleep, Maya.
Maya
Our house is new.
Leo
Then it’s new house physics. Which is worse. Everything’s still settling. That’s science.
Maya
He’s making that up. I can always tell, because he says "science" at the end.
Leo
That’s — okay, that’s fair.
Maya
And he went right back to snoring, because Leo could sleep through a marching band.
But Moose was awake.
He’s standing in the middle of the room with his head down low. He’s staring under my bed. And every single hair on his back is standing straight up, like he got a shock. I’ve never seen him do that. Not for the mailman. Not for the vacuum. Not for anything.
He’s growling. Moose doesn’t growl.
Okay — now he’s whimpering.
And then Moose does the worst thing a dog can do.
He tucks his tail. He backs up to the door.
And he runs.
Down the hall. Out the dog door. Gone.
Moose?
He left me. My own dog left me.
Leo
…He did do that. He was in the yard in the morning. I thought he just wanted out.
Maya
He wanted out, Leo.
The fake-out
Maya
Okay. It stopped. The crinkling stopped. I’m counting. Ten seconds. Twenty. Nothing.
Maybe Leo’s right. Maybe it was the house. Maybe it was the fog, or the pipes, or — I’m going to look.
I’m going to lean over the edge of my bed, and I’m going to look underneath it, and it’s going to be nothing, and then I can go to sleep. On three.
One. Two.
Three.
I lean over. Upside down. My hair’s hanging in my face. I look into the dark under my bed.
And there’s nothing there. Just dust. One sock. Four crumpled-up strawberry gummy wrappers.
Nothing. There’s nothing. Oh my gosh.
I’m okay. It was nothing. I’m pulling myself back up onto my pillow — Actually. No. Hang on. I’m waking Leo up. I want him to see that it was nothing, so that tomorrow when he says I was scared of nothing, I can say, yes, and you saw the nothing.
Leo. Leo. Look under my bed.
Leo
Why.
Maya
Because there’s nothing there.
Leo
…You woke me up to show me nothing.
Maya
It’s important nothing.
Leo
Maya. I’m going to say this once. Whatever you heard — it’s gone. It’s not under the bed. It’s not in the closet. It’s not anywhere. Okay? Now go to sleep.
Maya
And Leo was right. For once in his life. It wasn’t under the bed. It wasn’t in the closet.
It wasn’t anywhere he’d thought to say.
Because that’s when the crinkling started again.
But it wasn’t under the bed anymore.
It was above me.
Leo
Above you.
Maya
Above me.
The descent
Maya
I open my eyes.
At first it’s just dark. Then my eyes get used to it, and I see it. A shadow on my ceiling. A shadow way, way too big to be a shadow. It has legs.
One. Two. Three, four. Five, six. Seven. Eight. Long, thick, hairy legs, folded up against the ceiling like fingers on a hand. Right over my bed.
Don’t move. I’m not moving. If I don’t move, maybe it doesn’t know I’m here. Maybe it’s just — visiting. Maybe it likes ceilings.
Here’s what I know about spiders. They have eight legs. They eat bugs. Leo says they’re the size of a raisin. This one is the size of Leo.
Leo
Nothing is the size of me.
Maya
It was the size of you, Leo.
It had been under my bed the whole time. And when the crinkling got boring, it climbed. Quiet. Up the wall. Across the ceiling. To the one place in the whole room nobody ever checks.
Up.
And then it opens its eyes.
Eight of them. Pale yellow. Blinking on one after another after another. And every single one is looking straight down at me.
It knows I’m here.
It’s coming down.
It doesn’t fall. It lowers. One inch at a time, on a thick grey rope coming out of its own body — down past Leo’s bunk, down through the dark, down toward me. I want to scream. I open my mouth and nothing comes out. I want to run. My legs won’t listen. I’m frozen all the way through, like a girl made out of ice.
Leo. Leo. Wake up wake up wake up —
Leo
…mm. Gummies…
I don’t remember saying that.
Maya
You said it.
I tried to yell for Mom. I really did. But when you’re that scared, your voice doesn’t work like a voice. It works like a whisper somebody stepped on. So all that came out was —
…mom.
Down the hall, nobody heard. Down the hall, Lily rolled over in her crib and said "ba." And the rope kept lowering.
It lands at the foot of my bed. The whole mattress sinks, and I tip toward it like a boat filling up with water.
It’s the size of a wolf.
The wrapping
Maya
It starts walking up the bed. Over my feet. Over my ankles. Over my knees. I can feel every leg come down through the blanket, and the stiff hairs on them brushing my skin. Then it stops, right over me, and lifts its whole back end into the air.
I know what that means. I’ve seen the nature show. That’s the part where they —
Thick ropes of web shoot down across my legs and glue them to the mattress.
Leo! LEO!
It wraps my ankles. It wraps my knees. It wraps my tummy — around and around and around, until the blanket and the sheet and me are all one thing. It pins my left arm flat against my side. But not my right arm. Not yet.
My nightlight. The seashell one on my table — the one that makes everything safe. If I can just reach it — I’m reaching. I’m reaching. I’ve got — I’ve got the —
I knock it off the table.
The bulb pops.
And now the room is completely, perfectly black.
Leo
That’s why the nightlight was broken.
Maya
That’s why the nightlight was broken.
I can’t see it anymore. I can only hear it. It’s breathing. It’s right over my face. It’s — it’s wrapping my other arm now. And it’s climbing onto my chest, and it’s heavy, and I can’t fill my lungs all the way up, and Leo is asleep, and Moose left, and — I’m going to tell you a secret. I’m not brave. I’ve never been brave. I just talk like I am.
Leo
You’re pretty brave.
Maya
Thanks. Anyway. I couldn’t talk anymore. I’d used up all my talking. So I did the only thing left. I closed my eyes. And I listened.
It smells like strawberries. Why does it smell like strawberries.
The bite
Maya
In the dark, two yellow eyes blink on. Then two more. Then four more. Right in front of my nose. I can see the hair on its face. It has a beard. A spider beard. Two long curved fangs. And something clear and thick, dripping off the ends of them. Slow. The spider opens its mouth.
Wider. And wider. And —
Silence.
Maya
One drop falls off a fang and lands right on my tongue. I squeeze my eyes shut and wait to feel terrible.
…Strawberry?
That’s — that’s strawberry. That tastes exactly like Leo’s gummies. Why does the monster taste like — Oh. Oh, it’s not web. It’s cotton candy. It ate the wrappers all night and everything it spins is cotton candy! Okay. New plan.
Leo
This is the part I don’t believe.
Maya
This is the part that saved my life.
I bite through the web on my chin. I bite through the web on my arm. I chew and swallow and chew and swallow until my tummy is as tight and round as a balloon — and the giant spider backs away from me, totally horrified, because nothing in its whole life has ever tried to eat it back.
And down the hall, Lily throws her pacifier at the wall. And I open my mouth, and let out the biggest, loudest —
Leo
WHAT — what was that — was that a burp?
Maya
The spider shrieks like a puppy, scrambles backward off the bed, squeezes itself out through the window, and it’s gone. Into the fog.
Leo
Maya. Did you just burp so loud you woke me up?
Maya
There was a spider.
Leo
There’s always a spider. Go to sleep.
Maya
It was the size of a wolf, Leo. It was on the ceiling. It wrapped me up like a —
Leo
Like a what.
Maya
…like a burrito.
Leo
Uh huh. And how’d you get out of the burrito.
Maya
I ate it.
Leo
Good night, Maya.
Mom
You two okay in there?
Maya
…Yeah.
Mom
Go to sleep, kids.
Maya
I lay back down. My legs were free. My arms were free. My tummy felt like a very full balloon, and my whole room smelled like strawberries. I was almost — almost — asleep when I heard, way down the hall, the little flap of the dog door. And then the slow, embarrassed click of Moose’s claws coming back.
Some guard dog you are.
Maya
In the morning the sun came up over the fog and burned it all away, and everything was ordinary again. Mom made Leo vacuum under the bed. She’d found the wrappers.
Mom
Leo. Nothing in that bed but you and a pillow, huh?
Leo
…and a pillow. Yes.
Maya
Snacks bring guests. That’s my rule now.
Leo
You had a dream. A very loud dream.
Maya
And then the vacuum stopped.
Leo
It’s stuck. Why is it stuck.
Mom
Let me see. What did you — huh. What is that?
Maya
Wound tight around the wheels, stuck to the floorboard, was one long, unbreakable thread of bright pink sugar.
Mom
That’s… cotton candy. Where would cotton candy even — Leo. Look at me. What else was in that bed?
Leo
Nothing! I swear!
Maya
And outside, high up in the palm tree, in the very last of the morning fog — eight pale yellow eyes were watching us clean.
So. That’s what happened.
Leo
That’s what she says happened.
Maya
Mom still has the thread. It’s in a jar on the fridge.
Leo
…I don’t have an explanation for the thread.
Maya
I know you don’t. See you next time. In the fog.